On Mar 27, 2011, at 8:20 AM, Dan wrote: > I see Top Sites and the bookmark cover flow as being bs featuritis / eye > candy that serves no function other than to slow your work flow.
On a modern mac with a fast network connection they're quite usable...I know a bunch of folks who like it...when I offer to show them how to turn it off, they say "Why? I like this! I use it all the time! It lets me quickly get back to places I was, especially if I don't remember the name of the site." Different strokes... I'm they guy who has 'about:blank' as his home page. Your problem with these features is that on a PPC Mac, particularly one that isn't Core image capable (let alone Snow Leopard capable which has vastly improved Core libs) it's *is* horribly slow and resource consuming. But these features weren't designed with you in mind. Now we're back again, to the performance diff between PPC macs running 10.4 and Intel macs running 10.6. Again and agin and again, Apple's shown that they will completely ignore older tech. They're VERY clear, at each new OS Rev about what they do and do not support. A careful design goal of any new technology or feature introduced in OSX is 'Will it work acceptably on the currently shipping Macs?" That's the target, not "Will it work acceptably on 6-year-old Macs?" If it works on the 6-year-old one, fine, but they're not going out of their way to support it. This isn't active...Apple does not deliberately obsolete your old Macs (Core image was designed to have a fallback to CPU-only)...but they don't care whether your old Macs work well with their new stuff or not. Apple is busy skating to where the puck will be. Apple's great strength and frustrating habit is their absolute refusal to get into the 'long tail' support paradigm that has hobbled MS for so long. (And I feel this acutely...we just got asked to stuff WIndows 2000 onto a brand-new PC because the instrument software won't run under WinXP or Win7.) Apple learned that lesson the HARD way in the dark days in the wilderness of Pink and Copland, pre Jobs II. Trying to bend OS 9 into a modern OS while maintaining backwards compatibility helped to almost kill the company. OSX supplanting OS 9 saved the company, in the long run, because everything is based on it now: OS X and IOS. At some point in the future I expect to see the same 'creative destruction' take place when whatever supplants OSX/IOS comes along. (although I expect that may, in fact be a long time coming. There aren't, to my mind, at least, a lot of problems with either that aren't solvable within the OS, since it's so flexibly re-writeable. The underlying concepts of Unix has turned out to be a very sturdy foundation for adaptation and evolution of the OS.) -- Bruce Johnson "Wherever you go, there you are" B. Banzai, PhD -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
